


Protector of the Weak! Defeater of the Unjust! Go, Magical Girl Kurusu-kun!!!

by canticle



Series: Magical Girl Kurusu-kun [1]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Girls, Canon-Typical Violence, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, cognitive psychotherapy for fun and profit, does he really have to wear the dress? yes., the horrors of puberty but only a little, well-justified karmic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 06:17:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18005432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canticle/pseuds/canticle
Summary: Real life is not some sort of shoujo manga, and Kurusu Akira isn't some sort of anime heroine. He didn't ask for the heels, or the lace, or the frilly dress, but by god he's gonna rock them. Watching magical girl anime? Super fun. Living one out? Not so much.





	Protector of the Weak! Defeater of the Unjust! Go, Magical Girl Kurusu-kun!!!

**Author's Note:**

> by a technicality, i'm still within posting limits  
> i have so many thank yous that i need to put up at the start, but first and foremost to [ retro ](https://retrodynamics.tumblr.com/post/183230299224/my-second-entry-for-the-p5bb-event-for-a-fic-by) and [ mig ](https://twitter.com/LethcoMelissa/status/1102679568438226945), the artists who got to share this with me. i've included links to their posts on their names!
> 
> secondly thank you to everyone who did any work at all on the big bang. from everyone who started to everyone who finished, even if you didn't quite make it-- the work you did was amazing and you did so well!! i'm so proud of everyone!
> 
> thirdly, due to a number of personal reasons i had to scale this project way way _way_ back, so lucky for you(?) it's now the first story in a trilogy! i've laid down a lot of groundwork in this story that i'm super duper excited to build upon in the future when i'm not rocking back and forth in my chair biting my nails trying to make legal posting date, lmao
> 
> thank you so much for reading my crack turned real idea! i hope you enjoy it just as much as i did!

There’s a cat in his cell.

Somehow, that’s not the weirdest thing that’s happened to Kurusu Akira today.

 

 

His left eye is still swollen from where that big fucking bodyguard landed a solid right hook, swollen enough that Akira hasn’t trusted it to do more than squint open and shut, open and shut, to make sure that it’s still _there._ It’s not like he’s got all that much to look at, anyway; the holding cell he’s in is blank and featureless, pale grey cement walls and pale grey cement floor and a pale grey metallic cot hanging off the wall that he’d collapsed onto as soon as the officers shoved him inside and locked the door behind them.

The only thing that’s changed in the few hours that he’s been in here (he thinks, at least; there’s no clocks, his phone’s been confiscated, and all he has to go by is the sound of his pulse in his ears) is the way the moonlight slants into the room through the single window. The light makes the bars cast long, eerie shadows, inching across the floor towards him. He sticks an arm out; they intersect with his own shadow. Fitting.

He looks up. The cat is still there, sitting in the corner of the room like it has every right to be there.

Its eyes are a clear blue, the bluest blue he’s ever seen; like the sky during a perfect September afternoon. It’s black, with a cute white muzzle and four white socks and an incongruous yellow scarf tied neatly around its neck. It sits in the shadows in the corner, lashing its tail and watching Akira watch it.

Somehow, it feels like the realest thing in the world, more real even than Akira himself. The very air around it seems to throb and waver.

What a goddamn night it’s been. Akira groans a bit and readjusts himself so he’s fully on his back, trying to get comfortable around all his scrapes and bruises.

It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t his fight, but he sure as hell stepped in anyway. And look where it got him! In a holding cell in the middle of the night with a hallucinatory cat sitting in the corner judging him for his life choices.

“So what do they have _you_ in for,” he asks with the barest attempt at humor.

“I’m just here for _you,_ ” the cat says back.

Akira sits bolt upright.

What the fuck.

“What the fuck?” he says around a groan; sitting up that fast didn’t do anything great for his aching eye, and it takes him a moment longer to swing his legs around and down, bracing his forearms on his knees. “Did you just talk?”

“Listen a little harder next time, will you?” the cat says, and _rolls its eyes._

Okay. He’s _definitely_ hallucinating.

For what it’s worth, it’s a _very good hallucination._ The moon gleams prettily on every silky strand of fur as the cat steps forward into the light, stretching fore and aft, yawning wide and showing off pearly white fangs. It takes a moment to groom some fur down on one shoulder, then the other, then comes and sits right in front of Akira.

And then it lifts its paw and touches his knee, right where he landed on it when the bodyguard shoved him down, and it _hurts._

“What the _shit,_ ” Akira mumbles. He can _feel_ it. “Also, ow. Can you maybe not?” Is he this far gone? He’s only been in this cell for like, what, maybe four hours at most? Is he already going crazy? Is this what solitary confinement does to you?

He reaches down and touches the cat back. It feels like every other cat he’s ever touched, soft fur over firm muscle. “Are you—” it’s a stupid question, one he cuts off before he can get any more stupid over it. “You’re a cat. You’re a talking cat. You’re a cat that just talked and also somehow got into my jail cell.”

“And I’ll keep talking if you’d just shut up for a minute,” the cat says firmly. “After all, I’m here for _you._ ”

Akira blinks. “What does that even mean?” He takes the opportunity to tip backwards again, too; he’s still exhausted, still aching. The entire left side of his face throbs to the beat of his heart, and the scrapes on his palms aren’t going away anytime soon. “If you’re, like, some sort of metaphysical representation of my conscience or something, I just want you to know I don’t regret anything.”

And he doesn’t. He got that weird bald guy off that woman, even if he did get beat the fuck up over it. He _helped._ And that’s important.

The cat starts purring.

It jumps up beside Akira, sitting right beside his head and blocking out the rest of the moonlight. Somehow its eyes are even bluer up close, almost luminescent from the inside, and they squinch up in something close to human emotion. “You’d be surprised how close you are,” it says. “I’m something like an emissary. You may call me Morgana. I’m here with an offer for you, an offer that you’d be pretty dumb to refuse.”

“I think this entire night has proven how much ‘pretty dumb’ doesn’t even begin to cover me,” Akira muses. The cat— Morgana— purrs louder, its tail curling prettily around its paws. “Are you sure you’re not just some weird hallucination?”

“That depends on what your answer is,” Morgana says. “If you say no, I’ll leave, and you’ll wake up in this cell thinking this is all a weird dream. You’ll go about your business, and if you remember anything at all it’ll just be bits and pieces. You’ll do your probation, go about your life, and maybe you’ll do something like this again, or maybe you won’t— but that time, I won’t be there.

“But if you say yes…”

“What am I saying yes or no to?” Akira tilts his head just a bit. “That’s pretty important to know.”

Morgana lifts its paw and starts grooming between its pads. “I represent a certain...collective, you could say, that looks to preserve the balance of the worlds.” It shifts a bit; now that it’s so close to his face, Akira can see gold embroidery on the yellow scarf. Filigree and butterflies and a circle filled with symbols he can’t quite read.

Wait, worlds?

Morgana’s eyes squinch up even further at his surprise. “What, human, did you think there was only one?”

“Uh, _yes??”_

“Huh. What do they teach you in your schools nowadays? Can’t be helped, I guess, what with your entire species’ narrow vision and linear understanding of time. We can work on that eventually. But as I was saying, I’m an emissary of this collective, here to extend a hand—”

“A paw?” Akira blurts before he can help it. Morgana ignores him.

“We seek out people much like yourself. _Not_ just people in jail,” it says sharply. Akira closes his mouth again. “I could feel you burning like a star in the cognitive world. Your resentment, your fury, your sense of justice, wrong and right— you’re the most capable person I’ve found in the time I’ve been assigned to this world. My collective wants to invite you to join them in the effort to balance against entropy and the struggle to keep all the realms firmly in place.”

Akira blinks once. Twice. Three times. “You realize that means almost nothing to me, right?” he says over Morgana’s frustrated noise. “You— you’re a talking cat who phased into my jail cell from another world to offer me a job?”

“Yeah, sure, that’s just about right,” Morgana says, and prods at Akira’s swollen cheek, ignoring his pained yelp. “Soooo. What’s your answer?”

What’s his _answer?_ This whole situation is insane. Literally insane. “This is something that happens in weird niche anime,” he says, pressing his hands gently over his eyes. “This isn’t real.” Morgana pokes his cheek again, easily dodging the resulting smack. “Can you stop that?! That hurts!”

“Real is what you make of it,” Morgana tells him, his paw on Akira’s nose now. “With what I can do with you, you’ll never have to worry about not being able to do what’s right. You’ll be helping keep the balance over every reality. You’ll be able to do what you tried to do before.”

He really should just roll over and write this whole thing off as some sort of jail cell hallucination. But Morgana’s eyes are so blue, and the holding cell is so gray, and deep down inside himself he’s still seething, burning with resentment and rage, still craving the justice he was denied. That fucking bald asshole shouldn’t have been able to manhandle that woman like that, shouldn’t have been able to tell his bodyguards to give Akira the beatdown of a lifetime, and yet.

And yet.

It’s not fair that she was so terrified of that man that she told the cops whatever he told her to to indict Akira. He understands. He’s not angry about that. It wasn’t her fault. Neither was the way baldy drunkenly stumbled and bashed his head on a pole.

“We specialize in justice,” Morgana says, sweet and syrupy as sugar. The air in the room feels thick and stagnant, dust particles dancing in the light of the pale moon slower and slower until they seem to come to a halt. “I’m not going to tell you to make a contract with me, because that’s cliche and we don’t do that. You don’t get a wish. You don’t fundamentally shape the world through magic. You’ll shape it through _you._

“I’m going to offer you a choice, one time only. Will you join me? Will you join us?”

This is so fucking surreal. He’s in a jail cell. The moon is high and frozen in the sky, spilling light red as blood, red as rage, into the room. Time feels like it’s moving at a fraction of the pace. All he can see is Morgana’s eyes hovering above him, filling his vision.

His lips part.

He breathes in. He breathes out.

“Okay,” he says, barely a whisper. “Yeah. Do it. Make me a magical girl or whatever. Take my soul out and put it in something pretty that matches my eyes.”

“Oh, we don’t do that anymore,” Morgana says with satisfaction, its eyes slitting, becoming somehow even more luminous. “That’s way too cliche.” It steps onto Akira’s chest, settling down like a furry little meatloaf, and begins to purr again, kneading at his chest. Its claws keep catching on the fabric of his shirt, until they don’t, until they’re catching on his skin, until they’re inside of him, cold and sharp and fierce and ripping down, down down down—

 

He can never fully remember what happens after that.

 

When he wakes, the moon has passed the window completely, and Morgana is gone. So is the throbbing of his left eye, and the scrapes on his palms, and the bruising on his knee. He feels better than he has in a very long time. Akira tentatively lifts his fingers to poke and prod at the skin beneath his eye. It’s fine. There’s no pain.

He sits up. Something falls off his chest and into his lap. He picks it up— it’s a cellphone, black and red and sleek and fitting into his hand like it was meant to, like it was made for it. It’s warm to the touch, and when he pokes the screen light blossoms beneath his fingertip like a scatter of fireworks, like a flower unfolding. The screen turns on cheerfully; there’s no lock screen, no password protection. There’s only a few apps— the phone function, a music function, a messaging function, and a strange red-and-black icon that he wants to touch very, very badly.

Before he can, the phone vibrates in his hands, a message appearing on the screen from “Mona.” There’s a little photo icon there of Morgana’s smug little kitty face.

The message reads, “Don’t try anything until you can get home and I can walk you through it.”

Pretty good punctuation and spelling for a cat.

Akira texts back _how do you type without thumbs_ and doesn’t get an answer.

“This is so messed up,” he mumbles into the stagnant, quiet air. “Am I a magical girl right now or am I still just hallucinating—”

He sits bolt upright in horror, pawing for the phone in mortal terror.

**> >to: Mona**

_do i have to wear a frilly dress_  
_Morgana oh my god did i agree to wear a frilly dress while i was unconscious_  
_morgana pls dont make me wear a dress while i do your weird magical girl bullshit_  
_morgana pls_  
  
**> >from: Mona**

_We’ll go over it when you get home in the morning. Relax! Enjoy your stay!_

**> >to: Mona**

_can i have a refund_

**> >from: Mona**

_No!_

  


So.

He’s a magical girl now.

“You’re _not_ a magical girl,” Morgana says in exasperation, whipping his tail (yes, his; Akira’d started to feel weird about calling him an ‘it’ and made sure to check) one way and then the other in a hypnotizing sway that Akira keeps tracking. Back, forth. Back, forth. They’re in his bedroom, where he’s been banished to pretty much 24/7 after his parents came and got him from the police station. His mother hasn’t said a single word to him since. His father just shook his head and gave him some sort of “yeah we’re disappointed in you” speech that, frankly, went right over Akira’s head. The maids, usually friendly, avoid him like wildfire.

He’s pretty sure he’s been expelled, too. His mother hasn’t even said anything about him going to school. Guess he should enjoy the vacation, as it is, but being trapped in these whitewashed walls is only marginally better than being trapped in the gray of the holding cell.

The moon is high and full and he itches with the need to _go_ somewhere, _do_ something. Bantering with Morgana only barely helps.

“So if I’m not a magical girl, what am I?”

“You’re an agent of forces dedicated to keeping humanity as a whole intact!” Morgana says insistently. Akira’s read somewhere that cats train their kittens to hunt with their tails. Is that what Morgana’s trying to do now?

“Same difference,” he says with a shrug, his thumb running obsessively up and down the edge of his soulphone, then flicking it up to balance on his forefinger. It’s so perfectly weighted he feels like it could spin forever. It can’t wobble without him knowing and making infinitely minute adjustments to keep it stable. He thinks he should probably be a little more concerned about the ramifications.

But it’s only been a day or so since...whatever it was that happened inside the holding cell, and somewhere deep inside of him he doesn’t actually feel like this is anything more than an elaborate hallucination.

“Hey, Morgana,” he adds, and spins his phone back down into his palm like a butterfly knife. “Are you sure I’m not just imagining you?”

“Uggghhhh,” Morgana groans. “Clearly you need more of a demonstration.”

He stands up, flicks his tail, and steps neatly onto the wall beside him. One paw, two paws, three paws, four; he stands perfectly still, as if he’s on solid ground, but at a 90 degree angle to what gravity should allow.

“That’s not helping your case,” Akira says doubtfully. “Don’t get me wrong, but if you were trying to convince me that you’re not a hallucination, that sure as hell didn’t do it. Normal cats can’t defy gravity.”

“I am not a cat!!” Morgana complains for probably the third or fourth time, trotting casually along the wall to cross the room and hang, disconcertingly, from the wall behind him. “Show me your phone.”

When Akira displays the screen, he reaches over and slams his paw down on it, and Akira feels something intangible wrench inside him.

He’s on his feet before he knows it, the phone clamped tight in his fist as he backs up until he hits the wall behind him. Whatever Morgana’s done doesn’t stop; there’s a tightness, a squeezing on his chest, his arms and legs and — and what the _fuck,_ there’s inky darkness wreathing him like weird jelly snakes, black and red and emerging from his phone in an endless torrent and cocooning him until the whole world is blacked out and he can’t see can’t hear can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t think can’t _breathe—_

 _—_ and then he gasps, and heaves for breath, and opens his eyes.

His phone isn’t in his hand anymore, and there’s a brief moment of panic about that before he realizes it’s in a nice, secure compartment on his, uh...his chest area. Which is no longer covered by his sleep shirt. Instead, it’s, uh…

“Morgana,” he says, his voice admirably steady. “I thought you said you weren’t gonna make me wear a frilly dress.”

Because that’s what he’s doing. What he’s wearing, instead of his pajamas: red gloves that stretch up past his elbow, some sort of weirdly-balanced shoe that he can’t see past layers and layers of voluminous black and red skirts, and something on his face and in his hair. He touches his cheeks, his forehead, traces the outlines of a mask that’s appeared on the bridge of his nose, and — is that a _tiara?!_

Morgana, loafed on the wall behind him, purrs with barely hidden glee. “I’m not making you wear the dress. _You’re_ making you wear the dress.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Akira snaps, crossing his arms over the bare, uh, chest portion. Something about how uncovered his shoulders are makes him feel strangely vulnerable. “I didn’t put myself in this! You slapped my soul phone and—”

“And your mind created what you thought you should be wearing when you crossed over!” Morgana is far, far too pleased about this. “My, my, Akira. I knew you were going to be a strong one. Most people barely get the mask at first, and you’re already in full uniform.”

“This is my _uniform?!”_ His voice doesn’t break. It _doesn’t._ It’s an absolutely controlled and manly-sounding squawk because puberty is a fucking _bitch._ “No. No, I’m not doing this.”

As usual, Morgana ignores him, strolling towards his window and hopping up on the sill. “Freak out later on your own time, okay? We have a lot of training to do in the next few weeks before our first assignments come in.”

That’s something he’s going to have to unpack when he’s not still almost hopping in place, trying to pull the skirt down farther, the knee-high socks up further. And then he looks up, squinting, and asks “Wait, what do you mean _crossed over—”_ before his question is answered for him.

All his life, he’s lived in this house, in this room. The view out his window has always been static, unchanging, for sixteen years. The seasons modify it, sure, leaves come and leaves go, snow falls and melts, sometimes a tree gets cut down, but for the most part it’s just Inaba; slow, sleepy Inaba where nothing important ever happens and nothing important ever will.

But right now the scenery is foreign and strange, hazed with red. The trees stand out stark and black, silhouettes against a sky the color of old dry blood. There are no cars travelling the roads, and none of the few late-evening walkers either.

All that there is, is mist.

Dark. Ominous. Black. Swirling and undulating in ways that make his eyes want to cross or maybe bleed. Sometimes bits of it mound up, lumping like viscous waves piling over and on top of each other only to collapse back down and send eddies rippling through the mass.

It looks like….like struggle. Like something’s trying to raise itself up out of the miasma. “What the hell,” he breathes, weird costume forgotten until he tries to wipe the condensation off the glass and realizes his gloves have a lovely lacey overlay. “Morgana…”

“Did you know,” Morgana says as casually as if they were chatting over tea, “that Inaba is called ‘the grave of the gods’ among our order?” He pads over to step onto the windowsill again, his whiskers almost touching the glass. “It’s kind of a misnomer, to be honest. There’s only one god that died in Inaba, and that was more than enough. Open the window, Akira.”

Akira opens the window.

The air outside is cold and crisp and clear, invigorating in a way he’s never felt before, a way that makes him want to jump and run and bare his teeth and rip his way into the mist until it vanishes. He’s hesitant to stick much more than his hand outside, though, until Morgana brushes past him into the gap like nothing’s wrong, like the wold outside isn’t some sort of nightmare covered in black goop. “More than enough to do what?” he asks quietly, not wanting to draw any attention to him.

“To thin the boundary between reality and cognition. Come on, come out. It can’t hurt you from all the way up here.”

Morgana hasn’t steered him wrong so far. He goes out there.

At first he just paces along the roof, staring at the mist coating the ground below. It’s not lit up by whatever weird light emanates from the sky; in fact, it’s not lit up by anything at all. Akira can make out patches and swirls of darker shadows occasionally, like currents forming and dying away.

He desperately, desperately does not want to go down into the mist. There’s something repulsive, something revolting about it. If he was a cat, he thinks his own hackles would be raised. He might even be hissing and spitting.

His high heeled boots (they go up almost  to his knees. He hasn’t looked, but he can feel them flexing around his calves) clack annoyingly on the roof slates. Somehow he isn’t as wobbly in them as he feels he should be. The extra few inches throw off his center of balance, sure; they make him slow his normally frantic pace down into something slow and steady, and he has to throw his shoulders back as a counterweight.

This is so fucked up.

“What did you do?” he finally asks, planting his hands on his hips. He doesn’t look away from the ground. “This isn’t— this isn't real. This isn’t Inaba. I’ve lived here all my life and it’s never—”

“Half-right. This technically _isn’t_ Inaba,” Morgana agrees. “This is more...an idea of Inaba, crafted from the perceptions of everyone who’s ever lived here.”

“Good to see imaginary Inaba’s just as boring as the real one,” Akira mutters.

Something stirs in the muck beneath him.

One of the darker currents pulls itself out of the mist like countless others have tried to, but this one...this one rises up and up, raising and coiling like some dark, massive tentacle, unfurling and unfolding until it towers upright. It looks like an oil slick, somehow more present than anything else in this weird world. It...shimmies, for lack of a better word, a motion like a wet dog shaking its fur into order, and then moves slowly, ponderously, down the street.

What the fuck.

“ _What the fuck,”_ Akira whispers from where he’s crouched (when did he crouch? Why is there phantom pressure in his chest, heat behind his teeth? His heart kicks up into high gear) by the chimney. “Morgana—”

“A long time ago, a god died here.” Morgana’s voice is quiet, his ears tilted all the way back in a way that suggests discomfort. “Gods die all the time, though, but this one died at just the wrong time and the wrong place to thin out the barrier between the conscious and unconscious worlds. Picture a mirror and a piece of plastic wrap; you can draw what’s reflected on the mirror onto the plastic wrap and then pull it away, and it’ll stay on the wrap. That’s sorta the relationship between the conscious and unconscious worlds. Or, if you prefer, between reality and cognition.”

It’s a lot to digest. Akira takes a moment.

“Humans are aware of this, of course. Where do you think your dreams come from? Your essence, what makes you _you,_ presses up against the boundaries between conscious and cognition. There’s a you that exists on each side of the barrier, mirroring your actions, soaking in the collective cognition.”

He’s stopped paying as much attention. The slow-moving, shambling oil slick is doing something weird.

“What I did to you was put your unconscious self back into your conscious body. Now you can visit this reality with your physical—”

“It’s moving,” Akira says sharply.

“Yes, it’ll do that, now are you listening or—”

“No, I mean—” he points to where the shambler has pressed itself up against the corner of a house like it’s trying to wrap around it and engulf it whole. “Is...are they supposed to do that? Is that normal?”

“No it is _not,_ ” Morgana says with clear and obvious relish. “And that’s where we come in. Where’s your weapon?”

“I don’t have one,” Akira blinks.

“Yes you do. Where is it?”

“I just told you, I don’t—”

But he does. Something pings at his hindbrain, rests heavy there until he puts his hand to his hip and comes away with something pleasantly heavy, something that fits into his palm like it was meant to go there, just like his soul phone. A long dagger, jet black with a silver handle and red gems studded into the hilt. He breathes out a noise of surprise. “Shit. Guess I do.”

“Close combat fighter? Really?” Morgana groans. “I guess it’ll have to do. We’ll work on expanding your arsenal later. C’mon, then, we’ve gotta get over there so you can stab it in the face a few times.”

One moment Morgana’s crouched on the roof beside him. The next, he’s sprinting flat out at a speed housecats normally aren’t physically capable of reaching, launching himself off the edge of the roof like a guided feline missile towards the neighboring house’s chimney. When he lands, his claws dig into the brick hard enough that it sparks.

“How in the shit did you do that?!” Akira yelps, still huddled next to his own chimney. “You weigh like eight pounds!”

“This is the cognitive reality!” Morgana calls back. “It’s all mind over matter here, and the only thing that matters is your mind! Now hurry up and get over here.”

Akira sticks his tongue out at him and strides to the edge of the roof.

“Oh!” Morgana adds. “And don’t fall off the roof! The way that you are right now, the miasma will consume you without giving you a chance to fight back if you touch it.”

“You’re kidding me,” Akira says flatly.

“Not in the slightest! Hurry _up,_ Akira, you don’t want to find out what’ll happen if that thing eats someone’s Shadow on your watch!”

This is so fucking stupid. “Are you telling me,” he says with heavy disbelief, “that I’m about to play the highest stakes version of _the floor is lava_ ever?”

“Yeah, pretty much! Now hurry up!!”

Fair enough. This whole night is wack enough that Akira’s not going to quibble over semantics. The houses are close enough together that if he gets a running start, he should be fine.

He backs all the way up to the far edge of the roof, just in case.

 

 

When he launches himself, though, it feels...off. He hangs in the air for longer than he should, weightless. His balance should’ve been off because of the heels, but he ran faster than he’d ever done in his life. And he overshoots the chimney by a good five feet, tumbling and scraping his bare knees on the slate.

It doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. Or should.

“Very good!” Morgana purrs, darting past him. “Hurry, hurry, it’s going to go for the roof, and if it gets itself into the air we’ll never catch it.”

“I hope you don’t expect me to know anything about anything you’re saying,” Akira huffs. He’s soundly ignored.

The shambler is still four houses down. Akira swallows, his tongue dry in his mouth, and leaps again, and again.

It’s still pawing at the corner of the house like some sort of weird gross dark booger smearing itself along the siding when they reach the roof. “You’re a fast learner,” Morgana says with the air of someone dispensing rare praise. “That’s very good.”

“Thanks,” Akira says as dryly as he possibly can. “So what exactly are we doing?”

Morgana doesn’t immediately answer, trotting his way across the roof to peer down at where the shambler has wrapped itself up and around the gutter and started questing its way towards the roof. “This is an expression of the collective unconscious.”

“That means so very little to me, but go on.”

It’s incredible how a four-kilo cat can have such a harsh, harsh stare. Akira casually averts his eyes and purses his lips, and eventually Morgana does continue. “This black stuff is basically condensed negative energy. The mist is a more diluted form, but sometimes it gums up like this. It’s our job to track expressions like this and keep them from affecting anyone’s Shadows.” At Akira’s blank stare, he sighs. “You’re human. You’ve felt depressed before, right? You’ve had nightmares, you’ve felt rage. You can express the entire range of human emotion. If something like that touches your unconscious self, it’d bleed through to the conscious self. People that seem fine one day and then snap and murder a coworker or a child or a friend? Swathed in this stuff. Waking up on the wrong side of the bed? Your unconscious self is walking around with a film of miasma over them.”

Akira takes a moment to parse this. “So...this is basically, what, therapy?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“I’m wandering around in a dress and heels stabbing nightmares in the face to help people not wake up and murder their families.”

“And preserving the balance of the worlds while you’re at it!” Morgana says. He sounds way too cheerful for this sort of situation. “So…” The shambler’s almost completely on top of the roof by now, a writhing sack of darkness that makes Akira want to hiss just looking at it. “What are you waiting for? Go stab it!”

Akira goes and stabs it. It’s not as easy as Morgana makes it sound.

For one, his dagger, while very nice and long and impressive, doesn’t stand up to the three meter long tendril the shambler whips at him as soon as he approaches. For two, it smacks him in the face and almost knocks him off the roof; only some fancy footwork and the handy gutter keep him safe from the miasma below. For three, when he _does_ go and stab it, the ichor that splashes onto his face and hands burns until he frantically wipes it free.

But it moves slow, and with a noticeable pattern, and eventually Akira gets the hang of sweep-slash, dodge back, lunge-stab, roll right, twist left, slice-slice-slice until all that’s left is ribbons of fog melting back into the miasma below.

His first night of training ends in a sprained ankle, a bloodied nose, and a foul-smelling ichor splattered all over his front. Morgana seems to think it’s a job well done. Akira’s not so sure he’s inclined to agree, but he’s much more interested in consuming the entire box of cookies he has on his desk to snack on and then falling asleep for about thirteen hours.

 

They go out again the next night, and the night after that. Akira needs more practice, Morgana says, for when they get assigned; he won’t explain much more than that. It doesn’t really bother him much; it’s not like he’s going to school right now since he was formally expelled from Yasogami as soon as the police report went through, and that’s— well, not fine, he’s still really goddamn upset about that, but there’s not all that much he can do about it, right? So he’ll make the best of what he can, and Morgana will get them where they need to be, because even though he’s been doing this for less than a week Akira can already understand why they do what they do, all the way down to his bones.

The shamblers are made of concentrated bad feelings. Akira can brush them off well enough, after whatever Morgana did to him, but any normal human? No wonder Inaba’s had such a turbulent history.

He’s never wanted to stay here. Especially not with his funky new set of powers.

But he never expected _this._

“What do you mean I’m going to _Tokyo?!_ ” he blurts.

His father doesn’t even look up from the other side of the room, flicking through the newspaper with poorly disguised nervousness. His mother, on the other hand, looms over him at the kitchen table with heat in her eyes. “Four weeks, Akira,” she says, the heated look at odds with the ice in her voice. “Four weeks you’ve been gallivanting off out your open window to places unknown while we work tirelessly to get you back into a school that befits your station—”

“Oh, lay off with that,” Akira tries to interrupt, but his mother is a woman who will not be gainsaid.

“Four weeks! After you’ve been charged with _assault!_ Four weeks of violating your house arrest at every given opportunity, and you think I would just let that slide! Be grateful I’m not sending you off with the _police!”_

He’s so caught off guard that he can’t even fight back. Morgana had said that he’d be sent where he needed to go— _wherever_ he needed to go, that’d been emphasized, but Tokyo?! Is this really the work of Morgana’s unknown overlords or is this just— karma of some sort?

He’s never even been to _Osaka,_ for fuck’s sake! He’s never been any place bigger than Okina! How the hell is he supposed to function in Japan’s largest city?!

And probation!

He wouldn't have minded travelling on his own but he’d honest to _god_ almost forgotten his night in jail, too preoccupied with all the things he’s doing in the night, too preoccupied by sleeping and refuelling in the day. Now that it’s coming back to bite him in the ass, he wishes he hadn’t.

He wanted to go somewhere else. He’d never thought it’d be like this.

In his pocket, his soul phone buzzes. It does that occasionally, letting him know when his emotional state isn’t quite as steady as it should be, telling him how low his health and stamina (like a fucking videogame, only it’s his real life manifested by two bars, one red, one purple) are. He doesn’t dare check to see if it’s that, or Morgana trying to tell him something. Not with his powerhouse of a motherglaring daggers at him like he’s the biggest disappointment her life has ever brought her.

He’s used to that look by now anyway.

His head still spins with how sudden this all is.

Should he fight back? Should he protest? There’s no way he should just roll over and say “oh boy, okay, sure, fun fun, bye mom bye dad I’ll try not to besmirch our family name anymore or get murdered by rogue yakuza in the streets”, but...there’s no point in fighting it, either. Even without preternatural assistance, his mom’s the most stubborn woman he’s ever met. Akira shares that with her.

Still.

He turns to his dad with a silent plea, but all he does is flip the page of his newspaper and duck his head down a little further. Akira has to swallow bile and rage down through the lump in his throat, shoving his way back from the table so hard the legs of his chair make awful screeching noises against the tile. “Fine,” he says, calmer than he feels. “Cool. Great. It’ll be just like you’re back to having no kids at all. Bet you’ll like that.”

“Don’t talk to your mother like that,” his father says, barely audible above the way Akira makes the chair scrape a little more, just to be petty, just to see that little furrow in her brow that she gets when she’s pissed because at this point that’s all the emotion she ever _has_ for him—

His phone vibrates again, more insistently this time, and Akira all but flings himself up the stairs and into his room, locking his door behind him.

Almost unwillingly, he pulls the phone from his pocket.

It’s not his usual lockscreen, something black and red and swirling in soothing, happy patterns, throbbing to the beat of his heart. Instead there’s a few indicator bars, the most prominent in red and labeled “EMOTIONAL STATUS: TURBULENT— RECOMMEND CALMING ACTIVITY.”

Uh, _yeah,_ his emotional status is turbulent, he’s a goddamn teenager! He’s so stressed lately he’s breaking out in pimples! He bares his teeth at it in irrational disgust, and the status bar ticks down two notches— 67% to 65%.

“You should probably take a moment to breathe,” Morgana says from behind him, sprawled on his pillow again. Akira spins to bare his teeth at him too. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m giving you helpful advice!”

“How,” Akira snaps, “is telling me to breathe helpful?”

“Because if you let your emotional state get too riled up, it’ll be bad for you.” Morgana starts licking himself, splaying one pink-padded hind paw further into the air. “Did you think those indicators were just for show? We tell the girls to mind it more, because their hormonal swings surge harder and faster, but it’s important for you too. The more emotionally compromised you are, the less your powers will work with you. Show me your phone.”

Akira clutches it tighter in his fist. “No.”

Morgana looks at him evenly. There’s judgement in those blue eyes, judgement that ramps his emotions even higher, but also understanding. No pity, just acknowledgement. “Then tell me what it says. I’m not here to fight you, I’m your _partner._ Everything I do is to keep you happy and healthy, up to par to do our jobs, and to keep our partnership well and intact. And that means keeping an eye on your emotional and physical health.”

Abruptly, Akira’s guilty. He knows this. Morgana might be a little snide sometimes, might push him farther and harder than he wants to be pushed, but he’s never lied to him. Never hurt him. Always encouraged him to do his best. He’s never let Akira down before. His hand unclenches on his phone; in quiet apology, he tilts the screen Morgana’s way, checking it himself as he does.

The bar is down to 63%, lower than it’s ever been. Silently Morgana gets up, stretches fore and aft, and hurls himself into Akira’s chest.

“Pay close attention,” he says sternly. “I’m only doing this because you’re stressed, okay? Don’t treat me like a toy or a pet!”

Akira doesn’t get a chance to question him, because Morgana’s already shoved his face into the side of Akira’s cheek and started purring, purring, purring.

Morgana is such a dear friend. He doesn’t say a word when Akira squeezes him a little too tight, or when the tears start landing like raindrops on his dark, dark fur. He just stays there and purrs, and that’s really all Akira can ask for.

He’s grateful. By the time he’s cried himself out, his indicator’s up to 75% and stable.

 

Tokyo is… an experience that Akira’s not sure he’ll come out through unscathed.

Morgana can’t tell him exactly why _Tokyo_ is their assignment. He’s unusually grim as Akira packs, though, and sees fit to mention that the three or four other partner pairs in the area haven’t been checking in for a while. When Akira presses him on the matter, he refuses to say anything else.

The man he’s sent to live with, one Sakura Sojiro, is gruff and unyielding and wants him to live in the dusty storage attic above his coffee shop. The room has a very nice window that’ll be quite convenient to slip through every night, so you win some, you lose some.

Sakura’s house is pretty close by, a nice easy walk to and from work every day. It’s innocuous enough, a small corner abode that keeps Akira up in a cold, fearful sweat all night his first evening. The sheer amount of miasma pouring off of it leaves the streets flooded nearly up to his window, a torrent of negative emotions like a waterspout reaching to the heavens. It’s hideously, horribly oppressive; the mental pressure alone makes him feel like his skin is being flayed off if he so much as thinks about heading into the cognitive world from the attic.

It makes him later than he wants to be, leaving for his first day at his new school. Shujin Academy, huh? Literally prison school. Out of one cell and into another.

He could take the subway. It’d be better for familiarizing himself with the city, but...it’d be quicker to go overland. Morgana doesn’t dissuade him, either, so he ducks into the first unoccupied alleyway he can find and crosses over to straddle that fine line between cognition and reality.

It’s a new skill, discovered just before he left Inaba proper; borrowing from the cognitive world to influence his skills in reality. It burns his stamina like a bitch, but at this point he doesn’t have very many other options.

Nobody in Tokyo ever looks up, anyway. He leaps up to impossible heights, swinging around and up a fire escape ladder until he reaches the rooftops and sets off running.

All he’s missing is a slice of toast to hold in his mouth while he runs and he’s a proper shoujo anime protag, huh?

He’s almost there— he thinks he can actually see the school gates from a break in the rooftops— when a miasma appears in the alley below him with a ripple strong enough to make him stumble, even thirty, forty feet above the ground.

That’s not right. He should’ve felt it long before, especially one this strong. It shouldn’t have been possible to creep up on him like that. Morgana crouches on the rooftop beside him, having launched himself free of Akira’s bag the second he stumbled; his hackles are raised. “Akira! Look!”

He sees it too, in the same moment.

There’s a civilian in the alleyway below, flat on his ass from the shock of a rift between worlds tearing open in front of him. There’s already a shambler trying to ooze its way out from the gap, tendrils waving blindly, eagerly, hungry.

Lucky for him that Akira’s there, right?

He lands boots-first on the shambler from three stories up, knocking it flat to the ground with a sickening squelch. In the same motion his dagger’s out and slashing, separating head from body and narrowly avoiding the backsplash of ichor.

He stands up slowly, shaking his dagger and boots free of muck and— oh shit, right, there’s someone else in the alleyway with him, staring.

Honestly— he gives himself a quick look-over— even if he hadn't just dropped 30 feet out of nowhere, he’d stare at him too. Shit, his costume changed again— a sleeveless vest flaring out into a half-skirt, pants so tight they look like they’ve been painted on, barely a step up from the thigh-high socks he’d put so much goddamn work into getting rid of. He’s a mess.

The civilian’s his age, wearing the uniform he’s technically wearing beneath his cognitive-assisted costume. He shoots the student a cocky, panicked wink, pinches shut the rift between realities, and flings himself back up onto the rooftops. If he’s lucky, he’ll never see the dude again.

He’s never lucky lately.

Unfortunately for him, the guy’s in his homeroom class, sitting behind a pretty twin-tailed blonde with Akira behind him. Morgana, luckily enough, manages to fit in the desk cubby so he’s not in danger of being kicked every time Akira moves his feet, but it’s not nearly comfortable, and he makes his displeasure known.

There’s weird shit going on in this school, too.

He’d caught the barest glimpse of it coming in, but as he leaves through the front door Akira spares a moment to squint, to half-activate his transformation. The world goes thin and translucent just long enough for him to see miasma all but gushing out of the windows, miasma flooding the halls, torrential fountains geysering off the roof.

What the _fuck_ is wrong with this school?

Why is it so miserable?

Some of the students he’d seen in the hallways have bruises that all but ache with the same feeling that touching the miasma gives him. There’s a kid in his homeroom that sits two or three rows over, bruises layered in hideous yellow-green over deep purple over fresh red, and no one looks. No one says anything!

His homeroom teacher is a tired, scruffy brunette who gives him an exhausted look on his way out and tells him not to get into trouble. He’d already heard her bemoaning the fact that he was transferred to _her_ class earlier, so it’s not a surprise, but it still stings. He’s a good student when he’s not being an otherworldly vigilante.

Other people avoid him in the halls like he has rabies. He can hear them whispering; somehow, news of his criminal record got leaked before he got here. It doesn’t bother him as much as it should, though the sight of a couple of first years actually flinching away from him like he’s a demon galls him.

He doesn’t really understand what’s going on in this school, and he doesn’t like it. He keeps getting flickers of the cognitive world at the periphery of his vision, probably from the sheer amount of miasma soaking this school; the students keep turning into shambling yellow-eyed shells of themselves and back whenever he looks away.

Honestly, it’s just an awful first day in general.

He could rooftop-hop it back home, but he’s tired; his stamina is lower than he wants it to be, too. It’s more difficult using his powers in the real world, and the packaged bread he bought for lunch from the vending machine did next to nothing to top him off. He’s gonna have to figure out a better way to refuel; home cooked meals are the best, but those have been few and far between (read: nonexistent) here in Tokyo. He’s had good luck with some canned drinks and certain types of coffee.

All things considered, he’ll be best off taking the subway. He thinks he can figure it out, anyway.

It’s a decision he regrets as soon as he steps below ground.

There’s something wrong. Something horribly, horribly wrong. He feels Morgana stiffen in his bag, feels him start hissing under his breath in something like a chant. He’d like to ask why, but there’s a limit to how much weird shit he can do without getting noticed, and asking his bag why it’s hissing like that is probably over the threshold.

There’s something in the air, something that vibrates disharmoniously down to his bones. Something almost tangible, like pressing aluminum foil to a metal filling. Something about his vision seems to waver, phantom flashes like ghostly fireworks firing off directly behind him, showing only the reflections of aftershocks.

He wonders if it’s something about the cognitive side of reality. Something just _doesn’t feel right_ down here. Thin and tenuous, warped and uncomfortable. He doesn’t want to look, too focused on finding a space on the train, too focused on keeping himself and all of his bits in his own space.

When he looks up, though, after the train starts moving, in the reflection of the window across from him he sees eyes.

Dozens.

Hundreds.

Eyes outside, eyes inside, reflecting and refracting and nauseating yellow and all of them, every last one, fixated on him. Outside the train the walls run red-black-red-black, a pulsating, nauseating melted mess.

It’s horrifying.

No one else in the train so much as glances in his direction, but in the window, plastered like a temporary tattoo on the surface of a soap bubble, the dozens of Shadows on the train meet his stare gaze for gaze.

He scrambles out of the train at the next stop in a cold sweat, trembling so hard his teeth clack together. What the fuck was that?! He’s never experienced anything like that.

Morgana doesn’t have any answers for him, only a quiet “Don’t ever go into the cognitive reality from the subway, okay?”

Akira doesn’t hesitate to agree.

  


Half the reason why there’s enough miasma pouring out of Shujin to make Akira’s hackles rise even in the real world can be directly traced back, he thinks, to Kamoshida Suguru, the volleyball coach. A couple of quick google searches give Akira a name and an age and just enough of a backstory to get his deal— a man who thinks he’s just over his prime and is frantically clambering hand and foot, tooth and nail, to stay at the top of his metaphorical hill. He’s got an Olympic medal and enough of a superiority complex that Akira can almost taste it just walking past him in the hall.

Yasogami High never had anything like him, but Akira recognizes his type as is. He’s regarded as essential by almost the entirety of the school. That’s easy enough to suss out, even with Akira’s limited detective abilities. He understands, in a way; it’s easy to ride on the coattails of someone else’s fame— but for the most part he’s baffled.

Kamoshida Suguru is a slimy, unpleasant, unrepentant asshole of a man with a penchant for laying his hands on the students. Akira turns a corner his third or fourth day there and catches him pinning the kid from homeroom with all the bruises up against a wall, lifted high enough that the poor guy’s on his tiptoes.

He almost does something stupid, then, something like slip into the cognitive world right here in the middle of the school day and go to fucking _town_ on this assholes’s Shadow, but a hand grabs his elbow even as he moves to step forward. He turns his head just a bit, just enough to catch a shock of bottle-blond hair and a thunderous scowl. He’s about to really regret saving this guy from the miasma before blondie says, low and quiet, “Don’t.”

“Why not?” Akira says, annoyed and frustrated, but the damage is already done; his resolve is broken. He’s still a student here, after all, even if he is some sort of extra-reality force of justice too. If he jeopardizes his place here...he _is_ still on probation, and from Morgana’s lackluster answers he doesn’t think he’ll be getting any help from above.

Blondie— no, he does know his name, he sits behind him and every time the teacher calls on him he’s never quite sure what to say— Sakamoto— tugs on his elbow again. Akira allows his arm to lower, allows  himself to be guided backwards and around the corner and out of sight of his classmate’s terrified face. Away from the bruises on his cheeks and his jaw and likely other places too, places obscured by his high turtleneck sweater and long sleeves.

Akira breathes in through his nose, out through his mouth, and lets the anger bank itself, settle down low in his chest again.

Then he turns to Sakamoto. “You saw what he was doing, right?” he demands. “Why would you stop me?!”

“Not here,” Sakamoto says, looking around warily. “He could still be listening. Meet me by the front doors and I’ll give you an explanation.”

And boy _howdy_ does he.

Kamoshida’s domination of the school has been going on for at least a couple years, Sakamoto tells him over beef bowls that afternoon. He’s paying, which is nice because Akira hasn’t really had the chance to refuel properly these past few weeks. (He’s been running low on reserves for a while, too; instant ramen and crackers don’t give him anywhere near as much juice as a nice home cooked meal, but restaurant food is almost as good.)

Things were fine, Sakamoto says, until he took down the track team without warning, without hesitation. He points to his leg with a grimace as an example. “Snapped it like an effin’ matchstick, man. I spent three weeks in bed and six months in physio and I’m _still_ not back to a hundred percent.”

Somehow, Akira’s lost his appetite. He keeps eating, of course; there’s no way he’s not gonna top himself off when he can, but it’s mechanical. There’s no more enjoyment.

Is this what he’s here for, then? There’s endless schools across Tokyo, both private and public. Is it just coincidence that he’s been sent here to Shujin? Is he supposed to work around this while he’s trying to figure out who’s causing mayhem and destruction across the city?

“I’ve never seen anyone stand up to him like you were about to, man,” Sakamoto says, looking at him with respect. “You were about to haul off and give him one over _Mishima,_ weren’t you? Wish I had those kinda balls. You can’t even know the dude. You’ve been here, what, three days?”

“Four, yeah,” Akira says through a mouthful. “It’s not about knowing him. It’s about standing up for something that’s wrong. I’ve never been able to just sit back while something like that’s happening.”

Sakamoto nods thoughtfully, and Akira focuses back on his meal. If this is his task, then it’s his task. No use in wanting things to be different. He’s gonna excise the miasma out of the heart of Shujin Academy one way or the other, and then this section of town should calm down enough for him to get to work on whatever’s going on in Yongen.

Of course, nothing’s ever that easy.

He didn’t count on Kamoshida being a manipulative bastard as well as a physically abusive one. He didn’t count on the surge of barely controllable fury coming from a night of little sleep, a night spent tossing and turning with the miasma lapping at the windows, a night spent with his stomach empty and Morgana curled against the back of his neck, his stamina gauge ticking steadily down, down, down, the emotional indicators on his phone flashing at him like he can _do_ anything about it.

Yeah, he’s in a shitty mood— he’s hungry and he’s stuck in the middle of enemy territory with the responsibility of millions of souls on his shoulders and if he doesn’t figure it out—

Well.

It’s not even a full day before he comes across Kamoshida cornering a student (he barely catches a glimpse of blonde hair and downcast blue eyes and painted nails almost completely hidden in clenched fists). He doesn’t even hesitate; he grabs Kamoshida’s arm, forces it down, pulls him off.

It’s the wrong move, and he pays for it.

“Get your hands off me, Kurusu,” Kamoshida snarls, shaking him free hard enough that Akira has to take a step back. The air in the hallway throbs like the inside of some giant drum being compressed, like the beat of a heart forcing blood out and in, out and in. “I don’t know what sort of country trash school you came from, but here in Shujin if you lay a hand on me you’re going to face the consequences!”

“And it’s common here in Shujin for teachers to lay hands on their students, then?” Akira shoots back heatedly. Kamoshida’s gaze darkens further. The air throbs again, hard enough that he feels like his hair should be blown back.

When he blinks, he swears he can see a yellow sheen in Kamoshida’s eyes. Another blink, and it’s gone. The boundary is thin here, worn down by the oppressive weight of so much miasma. Akira’s positive that on the other side of that barrier, this hallway is just flooded with it. And this man is the source.

If he can cut off the head of the snake, lance this boil, he can cleanse the school. But how?

God, if he could just slip through, just for a moment, just long enough to pin Kamoshida’s Shadow to a wall and beat some sense into him—

He’s almost about to go for it when Sakamoto comes barreling down the hallway, his voice raised, his fist ready to swing. Akira’s fast enough to catch him.

He’s not fast enough to prevent him from swinging in the first place, and the consequences of that are immediate.

 

“Man,” Sakamoto says, just as pale as Akira feels, his voice shaky, his head almost all the way down between his knees. “I’m so sorry, Kurusu, I don’t— I don’t know what came over me, I just— he made me so effin’ angry, all the shit he was talkin’, and I just—”

“I know,” Akira says, cutting him off with a raised hand. He does know, better than Sakamoto himself, what happened. He saw the yellow in Kamoshida’s eyes, saw the answering sheen in Sakamoto’s own. Of course the miasma would coat them all. Akira’s got the training and discipline to resist it (mostly) but that doesn’t mean that Sakamoto does.

It’s his fault. He should have gotten them both out of there when he realized just how bad the miasma was. Instead, they’re now both sitting outside the principal’s office as Kamoshida tells Kobayakawa that he wants them expelled. “Don’t apologize,” he says, because it’s all he can do.

“What’re we gonna _do,_ ” Sakamoto groans in absolute despair, his head between his knees, hands laced at the back of his neck. One of his feet taps jitter-quick on the steps below. “I can’t get expelled, my mom’ll—”

“I’ll figure something out,” he interrupts, just to try and relieve some of the emotional pressure Sakamoto’s putting out beside him. It’s overwhelming enough that it’s about to set Akira off himself, and he doesn’t have time for that sort of outburst. His emotional indicator’s already going haywire.

He needs a minute to breathe but he doesn’t have time.

He doesn't have _time._

It’s always been in short supply since he moved to Tokyo. The days aren’t long enough, the nights over before he blinks. Time to eat, time to sleep, time to bathe, time to even pretend to think about studying; time to go over every single thing he needs to do on both sides of reality, slipping through his fingers like sand. He’s been losing track, he feels, ever since he made this fucking contract. Time’s turning into something nebulous, something that doesn’t quite connect to him. He’s untethered from time as a construct.

But just because it doesn’t affect him as strongly doesn’t mean that time stops moving forward for the rest of the world.

And between breaths, between what feels like one blink and the next, he loses it entirely.

He was given seven days before the expulsion would take place. Seven nights, his soulphone vibrating angrily at him every time he spends more effort than he really needs to dodging out of the way of several quick-moving shamblers rising from the miasma. Seven days, Sakura’s voice an uncomfortable buzz in his ears as he stares blankly at the worksheets in front of him, a cup of dry instant ramen half consumed beside him. Seven nights, the miasma so high that it laps against the attic windows and traps him inside to pace fretfully back and forth in circles on the floor until Morgana makes him sit and breathe, sit and think.

If he could just get to Kamoshida’s Shadow and knock some sense into it! He’s tried to track it out past the school, but something deeper into Tokyo proper is gushing miasma so bad it laps at the roofs of skyscrapers, fountaining up from the streets like geysers, changing the landscape to something alien and impassable the second the Shadow passes the Diet Building or steps onto the subway.

Seven days of attempts. Seven nights of being thwarted.

On the eighth day, he leaves the cafe as usual, expending just enough energy when he gets to the school gates to heft himself up onto the roof of the closest building facing the entrance. He watches students flooding in like a stream of ants, watches Kamoshida walk through the doors. Watches Sakamoto walk in.

Watches Sakamoto walk out.

He doesn’t bother wasting his energy trying to get home before the call goes through. Whether he’s there or he’s not, the same outcome is going to happen.

It still hurts to have Sakura meet him outside the cafe with a small cardboard box in his hands, dropping it at his feet before Akira can even say a word. “The rest of your stuff’ll be shipped out as soon as I get the supplies for it,” he says curtly, coldly. “Told you what would happen if you didn’t watch your step, kid.”

Yeah. He knows. What can he even say to that? What can he even do? Nothing.

He picks the box up and bows low, almost bent double. “Thank you for your hospitality,” he says evenly. _And here’s hoping that miasma from your house doesn’t get any worse, whatever the hell’s going on inside there._ “I—”

“Go on, kid,” Sakura says, and closes the door of Leblanc between them.

Ah.

The gnawing ache of hunger in his stomach reminds him he’s going to need to eat sooner rather than later. He’s got a granola bar in the bottom of his bag, mealy and unappealing, all but shattered in its plastic skin. He funnels the pieces into his mouth carefully, dry and unappetizing as they are. He needs everything he can get.

This changes so much, too much. This changes everything. His first priority should be finding a base of operations, somewhere safe he can spend his days away from prying human eyes and the nights that he can’t work out of the reach of Shadows and miasma both, but part of him just wants to sit on a bench in the park and bury his hands in his hair and just _breathe._ This is— how is this so fucky? How did this go so bad, so fast? Why couldn’t he get to the Shadow in time, why didn’t he just—

His phone vibrates in his pocket, strident and urgent. He almost doesn’t want to pull it out to look at it. He knows what it’ll say. Yeah, he’s having some emotional turbulence, who fuckin’ _wouldn’t_ be?!

He’s not entirely sure how long he sits there, phone vibrating in his pocket over and over. Eventually, though, he wipes his face with the heel of his hand and picks up his cardboard box. He’s still got work to do.

That night the light from the full moon seems darker, the air and the miasma thicker, his movements more sluggish, more clumsy. He’s had to chase several enterprising Shadows away through the streets of a residential area, rebounding off walls and balconies trying to be faster, trying to keep up just enough. He hasn’t seen Morgana since this morning. He’s trying not to focus on it.

It feels like no matter how much energy he pours out, his attacks barely hit, the Shadows brushing him off like a flyswatter as he winds deeper into the residential district. The apartments get taller, the miasma running through the streets shallow but fast like a deceptive stream. If he lands in it, who knows what’d happen?

A single misstep almost does him in. He lands wrong right on the edge of a roof, the heel of his boot sliding backwards; he windmills his arms, but can’t recover in time to keep from falling off.

His back hits the patio fence of the highest apartment with a noise that sounds like a brick falling onto a dry tumbleweed, and a sensation like lightning hitting every single nerve in his body at once. It’s agonizing, excruciating; he’s never felt anything like it, and the Shadow above him makes a cackling, mocking noise as he tries to struggle to his feet.

He can barely move his legs. Something’s wrong, something’s really, truly wrong, and if he had the sp he could heal himself, but he’s running so low—

There’s nothing he can do. He has to retreat back to the real world, and maybe he can break into this apartment (he’s sorry, he’s sorry, but he’s _desperate_ ) and figure something out. The barrier is thin here as is; he twists and gets his thumb on his soulphone, just as he meets the eyes of a Shadow curiously looking out through the patio glass at him.

_Fuck!_

It takes everything in him to grab the patio ledge and pull himself over, dropping down onto the next one hard enough to shake the floor, but it does the trick; he’s out of view of whoever was about to see him, safe enough to drop his hand and slither fully onto the cold patio concrete, limp like a dead fish.

His nose is bleeding. His forehead and lip might be, too. His mask only really protects the bridge of his nose. Landing face first didn’t do him any favors.

Behind him, just as he taps the icon, the miasma surges one last time. As the world goes glassy and fragile in the way it always does crossing across the worlds, one fragment of it breaks off the main, resolving itself into an amorphous blob with bright yellow eyes and way too many fangs to fit into one mouth, pedipalps clinging onto the edge of the patio stickily.

He’s so _tired._ Maybe he’ll just let it eat him—

Behind him, the sliding glass door opens, and a somewhat familiar voice says “What the _eff_ is goin’ on out here??”

There’s a civilian. Akira drags himself upright with a start, his face a snarl beneath his mask as he whips his hand up— shit, his dagger’s all the way over there, it fell out of his hand when he hit the ground— that doesn’t matter, mind over matter mind over _matter—_

Something hits his palm, hard and heavy. His fingers know how to curl around it; his brain knows exactly where to aim.

He pulls the trigger. A perfect circle forms between the Shadow’s eyes, spattering its ichor out the back of its loosely formed head. The pedipalps lose their grip, already starting to vanish into the strange crystalline smoke they fade away into when they die. It’ll be fully unformed before it hits the ground.

Distantly, he realizes he’s heaving for breath, and that there’s still someone frozen at the door of the patio. He should be more concerned about it. He’s not. There’s nothing to be concerned about. He’s done his job. Now he just has to slip back between worlds and—

And what?

...he’s tired.

As if an afterthought, he lowers the hand with the gun, tucking it into a holster that’s formed at his hip. His brain knows where he put it; his muscles know how to comply. The person at the door hasn’t moved. They’re barely breathing— or, he thinks they aren’t, he still can’t really hear much over the beat of his own pulse and the sound of his own breath, ragged and too-heavy.

He tilts his head, just a bit, just to see if he needs to make a quick getaway— then turns fully at the sight of bleached yellow hair and shocked brown eyes. “Oh,” he breathes. “What a coincidence.”

“Holy _shit,_ dude,” says Sakamoto, “you’re the guy that came outta nowhere and fu— ‘effed up that whatever that was like a month ago, right?? I coulda sworn I was just hallucinating it.”

This...is a conundrum. His other hand is still holding his soulphone; he’s still in uniform. There’s no guarantee that’ll be the case if he lets up on the icon, but if he doesn’t, the little singularity between worlds he just passed through will stay up there until he does. There’s nothing around right now that could come through. That doesn’t mean that’ll be the case in, oh, the next five, ten minutes or so. Especially in this area, the miasma turbulent with emotion—

Probably originating from Sakamoto himself, as is. He winces, and hopes Sakamoto doesn’t see it.

Oh, he’s talking. “ — okay, dude?” he says, still not moving from the door, though his brows are furrowed. “Y’ain’t lookin’ so hot.”

“That’s offensive,” Akira says on autopilot, dredging up enough energy to put a hand on his hip and smirk. Thank god his outfit resembles pants today, even if they do look more like they’re painted on than anything else and the boots come up over his knee. “I’m probably the hottest thing around here.”

_Why the fuck did he say that._

Sakamoto barks a laugh, oblivious to Akira’s sudden and immediate inner turmoil. “Yeah, okay, dude, sure. Can you at least tell me what the hell that was, or why you’re standing around on my patio wearing some sorta costume and shooting monsters in the head? Monsters that somehow got up to the _sixth floor??”_ Some of the humor leaches out of his voice by the end of his sentence. Getting spooked can do that; he’s holding up pretty well so far, for someone who’s realizing that something he thought might’ve been a weird nightmare actually happened.

He really shouldn’t say anything. He _shouldn’t._ But there’s a smell wafting out of Sakamoto’s apartment that’s making his stomach want to claw its way out of his flesh and go after it as an independent organism…

“I’ll make you a deal,” he says, striving for _casual_ over _creepy_ and ending up somewhere in the realm of _overeager._ “You give me some of whatever smells amazing in there, and I’ll answer... _some_ of your questions.”

Sakamoto squints at him. “You stay out here,” he says dubiously. “I don’t want you trailing your weird monster summoning funk all over my house.”

“That’s valid,” Akira graciously says, and takes a seat on the edge of the patio wall. “You go ahead. Bring me whatever magic you’re cooking up in there, and I’ll stay right out here where you can keep an eye on me. Maybe even two.”

And he _winks._

God, what the fuck _is he doing._

The tension drains back out of Sakamoto’s face and shoulders as he laughs again. “Yeah, okay, weirdo.” He’s not gone for long before he returns, a plate full of what looks like slow-cooked chicken, mashed potatoes and roasted carrots in both hands. “Might’s well eat out here with you if you’re gonna explain, right? Dig in.”

“ _Thank you,”_ Akira says, fervent and more sincere than he’s ever been in his entire life. The plate is clean within thirty seconds, and he has to restrain himself from licking the leftover mashed potato smear from it.

Sakamoto, still leaning against the door with his fork halfway to his mouth, stares at him. Akira self-consciously wipes a bit of gravy from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “Sorry. It’s… been a while since I’ve had a home cooked meal like that,” he says, almost giddy in how much better he feels. A surreptitious check of his soulphone confirms it: his sp bar’s almost completely full again, and he’s back above half hp as well. He stretches and pops his back, his shoulders, bending over to crack his lumbar, just about ready to purr; the stress is still there, of course, but it’s pushed farther back into his mind, into a place he can ignore for a while until he needs to think about it again.

Sakamoto opens his mouth, then closes it again. “I can tell.” He hesitates, then sets the fork back on his plate and reaches out. “Here. You look like you need this more than I do.”

Once again, and stronger this time, Akira’s struck with bitterness that he couldn’t help Sakamoto in time. “Ah— are you sure?”

“Mm.” He thrusts it at Akira again, jaw set and stubborn. “Take it. Eat up. And then tell me what the hell that was.”

Akira takes it, and eats up.

He does a lot of talking that night; a lot of it is just meaningless chatter, but even that’s meaningful in its own way. Sakamoto’s clearly still reeling from his expulsion; Akira wonders if he’s even told his mother yet, but bites that question back before it can even fully form. He needs someone to keep him out of his head, and Akira needed this _food._ Two full plates of chicken and potatoes and carrots have him feeling physically better than he has in _weeks._

And, shit, if he feels this good then maybe he can finally track that _bastard_ down and knock some sense into him, right? It’d be a waste if he didn’t. A waste of good food, of Sakamoto’s hospitality and good humor, helping to lift his emotional state even as the food fills him with warmth.

As if reading his mind, Sakamoto sighs and leans back against his doorway. “Alright, dude. I gotta… you gotta get out of here. It’s late, and my ma’s gonna be back soon. We’re going in tomorrow— I, uh…” His face twists with emotion. Somewhere on the other side of reality Akira can all but feel the miasma surging. “There was an incident. With a teacher, and he expelled me. So Ma and I have to go in tomorrow morning for an exit conference.”

He stretches out a hand for Akira’s plate. Akira hands it over silently, his mind churning. “What time tomorrow?” he asks casually.

Too casually. Not casually enough. Sakamoto squints at him. “Uh...what’s it matter?”

Akira shakes his head. “It doesn’t. Don’t worry about it. I’ll get out of here and let you rest up.” He doesn’t wait for Sakamoto to respond. With a gesture, his soulphone is in his hand; with another, he hops up onto the balcony, balanced with nonhuman precision on the balls of his feet. “Keep your eyes out,” he says, and twirls, and lets himself fall backwards, to Sakamoto’s shout.

Between one breath and the next, he slips between worlds, kicks off the balcony below, and rockets off towards the rooftops.

If he’s going to fix his mistakes tomorrow, he’s got to plan.

 

He doesn’t sleep. That’s okay. Like he is now, he doesn’t need to sleep. As long as he has food and water and a source of healing, he can keep going, forever and ever and ever.

HIs soulphone stays stubbornly silent and still when he checks it. He hasn’t heard from Morgana in over twelve hours. He should be more concerned about that, probably.

 

From the rooftop, Shujin Academy is as much of a monolithic monument to suffering as it was the first time he saw it. The miasma still trickles from the windows, though here at night it’s more of a slow drip than an incessant flood, globs squeezing out from the windows like viscous, tarry tears. The building has emotional turmoil baked into the walls, enough so that it generates more on its own, a self perpetuating cycle.

Inside the halls will be filled with miasma, maybe as low as ankle deep, maybe as high as his waist, his shoulders. He’d have to press himself up against a window to find out, and he’s not eager to get any closer than he needs to until he absolutely _has_ to.

He’s only touched miasma once, on a bad fall during a night training with Morgana back in Inaba. It’s not an experience he’s eager to repeat; it’s a disgusting, cloying feeling, somehow going deeper than the skin. Slimy and cold, a pressure more dense than it should be, a stench fouler than anything has a right to be. Going into the school and dealing with Kamoshida’s Shadow will mean wading through surges and waves, crests and troughs, till not a single part of him will exit the building untouched. He’ll be submerged in it for god knows how long.

Is it worth it? To go through something so uniquely unpleasant just for one student he barely knew?

Of course it is.

Akira sighs down to his bones and gets up, his heels scraping against the rough surface of the roof.

Halfway there, something catches his eye. Something’s on the roof of the school, providing its own little miasma geyser. It’s nearly midnight; any cleaning crew should be busy in the bowels of the school, not messing around on the roof.

He’s well aware of what happens when you get too curious, but Akira’s never been able to repress his instincts in his life and he’s not about to start now. He burns a little precious sp to rocket him up and off the roof, his stupid awful poofy skirt (he’d almost gotten _rid_ of it, why did it come _back_ ) catching the air like the world’s worst windsock.

Roof to roof to roof, one more sp-assisted jump letting him hang in the air just above to get a lay of the land; once he does, he almost wishes he hadn’t.

There’s a girl up there. A student, on the wrong side of the chain link fence. What is she doing? How did she get up there? _Why_ is she up there, so emotionally turbulent that she’s pushing the miasma up in a fountain to either side of her?

Something about her is familiar; something about her pings his hindbrain. Dark hair, pale skin, bruises. Her golden eyes are full of tears. The miasma coats her like a shell, barely leaving her enough room to breathe.

Very carefully, Akira alights upon the top of the fence, careful to keep himself away from the miasma. “Hey there,” he calls down. The Shadow doesn’t move. “It’s a little late for you to be out here like this, don’t you think? There’s tons of better places to admire the moon.”

“It’s too late,” the Shadow says, hollow and forlorn. “There’s nothing left.” Her fingers loosen. “I’m sorry, Ann.”

The miasma makes a sucking sound as she lets go, and tilts forward, and falls.

Akira swears as loud as he possibly can and shivers back into the physical world, launching himself after a streak of white sweater and dark, dark hair.

For a moment he doesn’t think he’s going to make it. The roof is tall but not that tall, and he’d lost precious fractions of a second when his heels caught on the top of the fence, but—

_No!_

He stretches his arm out, lace-gloved hand close, so close, the ground rocketing up towards them both faster and slower than it should—

Time goes syrupy. The world goes slow. Akira’s fingers meet the girl’s, her face turning towards him in surprise, the knowledge of her decision writ large on her face. His soulphone buzzes wildly as he curls his fingers into hers, as he twists, spins, shoves her back into the air in a movement as light and graceful as a leaf on the breeze. The air cradles them, warm and viscous as molasses, giving Akira enough time to get his feet under him, his knees braced for impact, one hand in the girl’s hand, one outstretched for balance.

He touches down. For a moment the girl hangs in the air above him, backlit by the moon, shock on her tear-stained face, her hand held gently in his own like he’s just invited her to dance.

Then time catches up with them, and gravity does too. She plows into his chest hard enough to knock him backward, slamming into the turf with a strangled, but very manly squeak. The two of them skid backwards, the dew greasing their way like the world’s worst slip n slide, until he fetches up against a rock with an audible _thud._

It hurts, but only distantly, like the idea of a sprained ankle, a torn muscle. Nothing cracked, at least. He’s more worried about the girl as it is.

“Are you okay?” he asks tentatively. “Like, I’m aware that you just jumped off a roof, so maybe not completely emotionally, but, physically?”

Instead of answering, the girl leans back and presses both hands to her eyes, starting to shake. Her mouth is twisted in an awful grimace, like she’s trying her damndest to hold back her tears. “What the hell,” she chokes out, “just happened?!”

“The timeline as I understand it is that a) you went up to the roof, b) you jumped off of the roof, c) I caught you, and d) the ground caught both of us,” Akira says, not really sure what to do with his hands. “Other than that I can’t exactly say—”

The girl inhales sharply, dropping her hands. “You—” she starts, then really sees him, really looks at him. “What the hell are you wearing?!”

“I think the more important question right now is why you were on the roof? No,” he catches himself, “that’s a stupid question. It’s pretty obvious.”

The girl sniffs, and looks at him with a deeply sarcastic expression. Akira respects that, being that salty in the middle of what appears to be an emotional breakdown. “Gee, you think?” Despite her sass, her voice wavers like she’s about to break down any minute. It’d be best if they got away from such an open area.

He flickers back into the cognitive world. There’s...no miasma down here in the courtyard. In fact, they’ve got a clear shot through to the street. He’s never considered the ramifications of bringing someone else into the cognitive world before, but he doesn’t have time to now.

“Hold on,” he says, and with no other warning he pulls her through to the other side.

 

Her name, she tells him at a late night diner almost an hour later, is Suzui Shiho.

He wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the sudden, almost vicious way his soulphone had jerked, almost like a seizure. Between one moment and the next he’d gone from a dude in a (magical, ethereal, otherworldly) dress to a shambling mess still in his Shujin uniform, his back a long hot strip of fire, abrasions on his palms and the backs of his arms.

Was it really only this morning that he was expelled? God.

When he checked, his sp and hp were down far enough that the whole screen was throbbing red and urgent, something he’d never seen before. His uniform and the scrapes all over the side of his neck were enough for Suzui-san to wipe her eyes and herd him into the nearest still-open cafe.

She demands an explanation; he gives her bits and shreds of one between the burger she buys for him. She watches in fascination as the raw-looking flesh on his cheek scabs over the more he eats. When he asks for one from her, though, she clams up, picking at her own plate of fries.

“Kamoshida,” she says, scrubbing her eyes again. He doesn’t ask again, but once he’s finished his burger and most of the open wounds have scabbed over and they’re back on the street she elaborates a bit.

She’s a member of the volleyball team, like the guy with all the bruises— Nishima??-- in Akira’s former homeroom. They’ve been having it rough since Kamoshida took over their team. Really rough. Endless drills, corporal punishment for not performing well enough, working them until they bleed.

Other things.

She won’t say what. Akira won’t press her, either. His mind flicks over and over a few still images, worrying them like a dog with a bone. Nishima’s bruises. The pretty blonde pressed up against a wall. Suzui-san’s Shadow, pale golden tears streaming from her eyes, wanting nothing more than to stem them forever.

The dots, when they connect, make a grim picture. Suzui-san’s hands are still shaking, no matter how deeply she thrusts them into the pockets of her hoodie. It’s a familiar one, over-long and distinctively white; he connects the dots again, placing it on the pretty blonde, and the picture gets worse.

He’s not going to pry. He’s not even going to ask. All he’s going to do is make an offer and then follow through with it, staying by her side on the subway to a part of Tokyo he’s never been as she sends message after message after message to whoever’s on the other side of the phone.

Maybe if he’s lucky, she’ll write all this off as nothing but a bad dream. Maybe if he’s lucky, she’ll forget this night ever happened. Maybe if he knew more about magical girl shit, he could ensure that was the case.

But for now, all he can do is walk her to the lobby of a swanky apartment building and wait with her until her friend, loose blonde hair cascading down her shoulders, flies out the front door to sweep her into her arms.

In the resulting emotional turmoil, Akira makes his escape.

Suzui-san. Sakamoto. The pretty blonde, who’s name he suspects is Ann. Nishima. The volleyball team. The miasma flooding from the school. The source couldn’t be more obvious.

Kamoshida needs to be stopped.

His back aches. His cheek aches. His everything aches, but he can’t not do this.

It’s almost two hours later that he makes it back to his rooftop hiding spot, dropping back into the real world with a groan of effort and splaying spread-eagle on the gritty roof.

Somewhere beyond the boundary of the city, the sun rises, limning the buildings with gold, glinting on windows and street signs and cars with purifying fire. The city wakes, stretching its millions of limbs. The birds rouse themselves. The trains roar thunderously beneath the streets.

All around him, people move like they’ve been sped up, breaking around him like waves. People from the graveyard shifts going home, eager over-achievers heading in early to work. The businessmen, the policemen, the students. This city is so full of infinite diversity, a microcosm of humanity.

Down below, a familiar bottle-blonde head trails after a shorter, darker one, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

Akira takes a deep breath, down to his soul, down to his bones, and lets it shiver out.

It’s time to get to work.

 

His first step into the building is suspiciously easy.

The lobby is almost completely free of miasma, barely an ankle-high slushy coating on the floors. His feet feel chilled, a cold that leaches into him and makes him shiver. All around him, Shadows turn to watch his passage with curious apathy.

He’s never been in the middle of so many before. None of them approach him, or try to stop him.

Okay. Kamoshida’s office is on the third floor, and this early in the day the miasma cascading down the stairs is more of an irritant than a real obstacle. If it wasn’t for the goop on the floors, his heels would clack stridently against the linoleum as he walks, the Shadows parting before him and closing ranks behind him. He can’t read them, any of them; any hushed whispers fall silent completely as he passes.

He takes his first step up the stairs. Something _throbs_ in the air, like smacking a water balloon full to bursting, the ripples of tension spreading ever outwards. Almost simultaneously, a gush of miasma rounds the steps, a wave almost waist-high crashing into him, washing down the stairs and spreading out across the lobby floor.

So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?

Step by step he ascends. Step by step, the flow of miasma grows, until it’s swirling around his shins, then his knees. By the time he gets to the second floor it’s up to his waist, an indomitable torrent of slick, foul emotions. His lower half is already going numb, his soulphone buzzing, buzzing, buzzing away.

He has to do this. His hand grips tighter to the stair railing as he rounds the corner.

Step by step. Step by slow, awful step. The miasma tugs at him, reaching for him with thousands of grasping tendrils that he slaps off, brushes away. It’s an endless onslaught. If it were water he would have been long since swept away, the flow rising up to his chest, to his chin, but this is the cognitive world, and his mind is the only thing that matters.

He _will_ do this.

He closes his eyes.

His foot, blindly searching, finds no more stair to ascend.

The miasma closes over his head.

He’s reached the third floor.

It’s not smothering in the way that sand or heavy fabric would be smothering. He doesn’t drown in the way that water would make him drown. He doesn’t even need to breathe here.

It doesn’t sting to open his eyes beneath the miasma flow. Everything is tinted a strange, wavering red; the Shadows that line the walls indistinct forms with beaming golden headlights for eyes. He turns left, his steps strangely buoyant, his shoulders heavy. The pressure is immense.

Every step is harder. His doubts claw at him; he’s wasting his time, there’s nothing he can do here, it’s not like he’ll be able to beat Kamoshida, what’s even the fucking _point?_

He’s already wasted his chance, already fucked everything up for himself.

Morgana’s gone to go find a new partner, one who isn’t an eternal screw-up.

Things would be so much better for himself if he’d just stayed in that jail cell until he rotted.

Step by step. Step by slow, awful step.

Something touches his arm. He looks over, slow and sluggish, but all he can see is blinding golden eyes and dark hair.

Something takes his hand. He tries to pull back, but the Shadow puts its other hand over his. “Come on,” it says, voice indistinct yet somehow familiar. “You’re almost there. Come on, weirdo. You promised.”

Suzui.

Suzui’s Shadow tugs. Akira takes a step. Takes a step. Takes a step. Rounds the corner drowning in his thoughts. Every step is a chime of failure in his heart. He’s done for. There’s no point. He can’t do this. He can’t. He can’t he can’t he can’t he can’t he can’t—

His free hand hits a doorknob. Suzui’s Shadow squeezes his arm. “You promised,” she says again, barely audible over the sound of his own heartbeat, over his choked breaths. “Follow up, or be there when I fall again.”

When, not if. Akira touches his face, scrubs a hand across his eyes. He can’t do this.

But he can’t let Suzui down, either. What if she jumps again and he’s not there to catch her?

Beneath the despair in his chest, an all-too familiar rage starts to burn. It gives him enough strength to pull Kamoshida’s office door open.

The three Shadows inside look up in surprise. They’re mimicking their reality counterparts, with Kamoshida by his desk and Sakamoto standing behind his mother’s shoulder. Already the miasma reaches back down into his bones, trying to snuff out the hot white flash of rage buoying him.

Akira doesn’t give it the chance.

Whatever happens to a person’s Shadow in the cognitive world will reflect on it in reality. If he kills Kamoshida’s Shadow, Kamoshida will die. Akira doesn’t want that.

But scaring the everloving shit out of it? That’s something he can work with.

Kamoshida’s Shadow stands up, pushing away from his desk. “I don’t know what you think you—” he starts.

Akira unholsters his gun and shoots him in the knee.

Both Sakamoto and his mother reel back in shock and fear. Kamoshida’s Shadow howls as it goes down on one knee, clutching at the wound spilling bright golden blood all across the floor. He shoots again; his aim is off this time, and the bullet chips the tile floor beside him. The third one strikes true in the other knee, effectively immobilizing him.

It makes it that much easier to cross the room with two long strides, grab the Shadow’s hair, and jerk his head back far enough to knee him in the jaw.

It shouts in pain, its flailing arms catching Akira off guard, clipping his jaw with its knuckles. The pain sears into him like a brand. His mouth twists up into a snarl. He punches back.

Every time he lands a hit the air around them throbs, hammer strikes against the drum skin between realities. Every time the air throbs the rage builds up hotter and higher until he’s choking on it, until it’s all he can see, all he can hear, all he can taste, like iron filings filling his mouth.

Rage.

Rage!!

If it wasn’t for Kamoshida he’d be safe back at the attic, or sitting in class! Suzui wouldn’t have jumped! Sakamoto would still be running! A man like this doesn’t deserve freedom! A man like this doesn’t deserve to have peace of mind and restful nights when he’s going around destroying lives without even _thinking_ about it, without even a shred of remorse!

Akira’s going to make him _feel_ remorse.

The air pulls taut, like saran wrap stretched over his skin, pressing tight against his skin, mashing against him like he’s about to break through. He grips the Shadow beneath the chin, stretching it up as high as it can go. Its golden eyes are filled with tears, its features warped in a fearful grimace. Good.

His dagger is in his free hand. It would be so easy. A man like this doesn’t deserve to walk free. Not when people like Akira get punished for it.

The air shivers, crystalline, ready to fracture if he so much as breathes.

He could do it, the rage promises him, pounding at his chest like the fluttering wings of ten thousand butterflies. He could do it. It would be right. He can do _anything_ here. No one would know.

He could do it. He could. He could.

As if in a dream, his arm raises. The dagger doesn’t glint, if only because there’s no light to gleam off the wicked edge. Instead it looks as if it’s illuminated from within, red and black and deadly.

He could do it. He could. He could.

The miasma presses in, molds itself against him. He’s almost forgotten what it felt like to not be cradled in its embrace, to not have every inch of himself engulfed. The room is almost completely dark, except for the bright gold blood, the burning torches for eyes.

He could do it. He could. He could.

And then what? Go on to kill anyone else that so much as looks as him funny?

No! Don’t think of that! He could—

_What the fuck is he thinking?!_

Akira jerks backwards with a strangled noise, shoving the Shadow away from him. Realization floods through him like ice water. It’s the miasma, it’s soaking into him, changing his thoughts, twisting his mind, he needs to get out!

Beneath him, Kamoshida’s Shadow grovels. “Don’t kill me,” he begs, “please, I don’t want to die, I’m sorry!”

It makes the rage flare up white-hot again. When Akira blinks, his foot is on the Shadow’s chest, his heel digging into his sternum, his gun held pointed directly between the Shadow’s eyes. “You don’t want to die?” he asks, his voice echoing around the walls of the room until it sounds bigger than himself, bigger than all of them. The air quivers in response. “Then repent. Change your heart. Atone for your sins. Leave your fucking students alone and go to _jail,_ you disgusting pervert. Or I’ll find you. Wherever you are. Wherever you go. If we meet again, I won’t give you a second chance. Are we clear?”

“Yes!” the Shadow all but shrieks. “Please, just let me live! I promise!”

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, unclenching his fingers from the grip of his magical pistol one by one, until it swings from the trigger guard. It’s at odds with everything he wants to do, everything his instincts and his brain are screaming at him to do. Every single piece of himself is united in wanting to tear this Shadow apart.

That’s why he can’t.

That’s not what he’s here for. He’s not a killer of Shadows, he’s a...disperser of miasma. He’s a mender, not a breaker, no matter how much he wants to snap this Shadow’s neck so his counterpart in reality can’t hurt anyone else ever again.

What was it that he called himself, what feels like so long ago? A cognitive psychotherapist?

He’s not a killer.

The gun slips from his finger and dissolves before it hits the ground. The rage in his chest flares white-hot one last time and then goes dull and cold, a solid lump sitting on his lungs. “I’ll be watching,” he says, because that’s all he can do.

That’s it. He’s done. He leaves the Shadow a snivelling wreck on the floor, stumbling on knees gone weak towards the door, past Sakamoto’s silent Shadow, out to where a pair of cold hands take his own again. He follows them blindly, up and away until—

His head breaches clear of the miasma, gobbets sluicing away from his eyes, his nose, his mouth. He breathes in for what feels like the first time in years.

It’s cold. He shakes even as Suzui’s Shadow tugs him a step further, a step further, leading him up the staircase to the roof. The miasma sloughs off with each step up, like he’s rising out of a dark, tarry lake. Gobbets run down his shoulders, the length of his back, his calves. Even when they reach the top, the miasma thin enough that it barely coats the surface of the floor, he doesn’t feel clean.

His outfit’s changed, he notes without enthusiasm. He’s got sleeves all the way down to his wrists, something that feels like armor plating on his chest and back. Maybe he even has pants. He doesn’t have the energy to really go over himself to make sure. Every piece of fabric is either black or grey, black like he feels, grey like he feels, except for his gloves. They’re still the same red. Red as blood. Red as the blood he’d wanted to spill.

In the cognitive world, the sky glimmers like an oil slick, shifting in new and nauseating ways every time he looks away. He focuses on the roof instead, on Suzui-san’s Shadow’s hands, somehow still colder than his own.

“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you. You should go now.”

He should. He needs to find Morgana. He needs to rest. Now that the rage isn’t sustaining him anymore, all he feels is empty.

He takes a step, but Suzui-san’s Shadow doesn’t let go of his hand just yet. “Remember us,” she says quietly, fiercely. “We all will remember what you’ve done for us today. We owe you a debt.”

No, that’s not what he does, or why he does it. He’s not here for payment. He doesn’t want to have anything returned. It’s just...his job. His purpose.

Suzui-san’s Shadow lets him go, and he hops up to the top of the chainlink fence. Is it just him, or are the geysers of miasma fountaining from the windows slowing from a torrent to a gush?

“Remember,” the Shadow says one more time, her golden eyes locked on him as he leaps up, leaps away. “We will, too.”

 

Time slips away from him even as he shivers back into reality.

He walks with only a vague sense of where he’s going, narrowly avoiding the other people lining the streets. Everything around him is veiled with a vague sense of unreality, like even though he’s crossed over from the cognitive world some elements still remain. It feels like a soap bubble, a glassy sheen that’s ready to pop at any moment.

He gets on the train. He doesn’t pay attention to what line or what direction. It’s late enough in the morning that he gets a seat easily, and spends the ride with his cheek pressed against the glass, watching but not seeing. The walls flick past faster than he can perceive.

He gets off the train. His feet carry him onward, past the big open square, into the alleyways that were starting to become somewhat familiar. He’s tired, he’s so tired, all the way down to his bones.

An elderly old man nods at him. He nods back and turns a corner and— oh.

Leblanc.

He shouldn’t be here. His time’s already come and gone, he’s already torn the page out of that particular book. He should be figuring out where he’s going to sleep tonight. Maybe he can rest on Sakamoto’s balcony again, just for a little while—

The door of the cafe swings open almost violently. Sakura-san strides out, his hat perched haphazardly on his head, jacket unbuttoned, looking like he’s just gotten some unpleasant news about some dirty business he needs to take care of. Fuck, don’t turn arou—

He turns, like he’s reaching for his keys, and meets Akira’s eyes from where he stands just down the street.

Akira freezes, his fight or flight instincts going haywire. He didn’t— he hasn’t been hanging around here, he swears, he’s just— he didn’t mean to, he can go, he’s not here to cause problems—

Sakura-san’s shoulders slump. “Saves me a lot of trouble,” he grunts. “Guess you heard the news?”

The what? “No,” Akira manages after a too long pause. “Sorry. I was just. Walking.” There’s an almost imperceptable shift in Sakura-san’s face, a raising of his eyebrows, and he should really clarify but he’s just so goddamn tired, he’s had a long and horrible 24 hours and honestly he just wants to scrub his skin with bleach and sleep for three days.

In lieu of a comfortable bed, he needs to go find a park bench. He mumbles “Excuse me,” bowing low at the waist, and turns to go.

Sakura-san’s raised voice stops him. “Kid. Hey, kid! The hell do you think you’re going?”  Heavy footsteps sound across the pavement, hurrying to catch up with him. Instinctively, Akira flinches away from the hand starting to lower down onto his shoulder, but forces himself to stop and stand stock-still underneath its weight. “Kid,” Sakura-san says again, his tone unreadable. “Kurusu. The school called.”

The wind is still chill with spring’s teeth as it whips through the alleyways. He’s shivering. How long has he been shivering for? Has he ever been warm?

When he doesn’t answer Sakura-san sighs again, as gusty as the breeze. His hand tightens on Akira’s shoulder. “Come on,” he says gruffly. “Come inside. I’ve got some coffee on, and you look dead on your feet. Let’s get you warmed up and put to bed.”

He’s barely inside the door before a bundle of black fur all but levitates into his chest with an ear-piercing screech.

“Oh, yeah,” Sakura-san says over Morgana’s bloodcurdling _“WHERE WERE YOU!?”_ “This little guy’s been hanging around here for a while. He’s been pretty well-behaved, caught a couple of the rats that’ve been hanging out in the alley. It was cold out last night, so I brought him in. Hope you don’t mind a roommate.”

“It— it’s fine,” Akira says a little breathlessly, trying not to clutch Morgana too tightly to his chest. “I like cats.”

Sakura-san grunts. “Seems to like you well enough too. He’s a talker, though.”

“YOU VANISHED!” Morgana squalls right in his ear. “You just up and left and I couldn’t find you _anywhere,_ I thought the thing that’s been killing bonded pairs got _you_ but you didn’t feel dead! You stink like miasma! You’re in _horrible_ shape! What did you _do?!_ ”

“Hush,” Akira mumbles, burying his face into the top of Morgana’s soft, furry head. “It’s okay.” He’s not sure if he’s saying it to Morgana or to himself, but either way Morgana falls quiet. Not long after, he starts to purr, shaking loose some of the lump of cold iron that sits over his lungs.

He doesn’t even manage a full cup of coffee before his elbow slides out from under him, his cheek hitting the bar with a loud noise that even then barely jolts him awake. He thinks he hears Sakura-san laugh a little, but he’s too out of it for it to register all that much.

When he looks up he sees two of Sakura-san, superimposed over each other. The one rooted in reality is grim-faced, tugging Akira’s arm over his shoulder in an effort to help his shambling body up the stairs.

The one rooted in cognition looks at him with weary apology, but doesn’t speak. That’s okay. Akira doesn’t need words.

The cool embrace of clean sheets and the purring cat tucked behind his neck will do.

 

He sleeps for thirty six hours before Sakura-san shakes him awake and tells him to come downstairs. “You might as well start learning how to earn your keep,” he says as Akira stares at the apron he’s just been handed like it’s a venomous snake. “Ever used a coffee grinder before?”

“Nooo,” Akira says, drawing the word out long enough that Sakura-san huffs. “It doesn’t come already ground? I thought it just melted into the water.”

He’s grateful that looks can’t kill, because the look Sakura-san levels at him should, by all rights, liquefy him down to the bones. “You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”

A lot of work turns out to be standing behind the counter drying dishes while Sakura-san smokes a cigarette and monologues about coffee. It’s a lot of information for someone used to getting their caffeine from a can or in grainy instant packets mixed hastily into a cup of hot water, and most of it passes over Akira’s head.

That’s fine. It’s less about what’s being said, he thinks, than about Sakura-san saying it, and Akira pretending to listen.

He’s pontificating about some sort of high-altitude coffee bean when the bell on the cafe door jingles politely. Sakura-san falls silent, perhaps out of surprise that he actually has a customer; from what Akira’s seen, two a day is a rush, and three is practically unheard of.

The person who walks in isn’t the type to suit the cafe at all, either. Younger than retirement age, for one, much _much_ younger, with a full head of ungreyed hair and a persistent spritely aura around him, partially due to the pleasant smile creasing his lips. He’s familiar, in a way that nags at the back of Akira’s hindbrain.

“Ah,” he says, looking around. “What a homey space, as always. Oh, I see,” he adds, “I wasn’t aware that you were in the middle of a training session, Sakura-san. My apologies. Should I step out?”

“Don’t bother, Akechi-kun,” Sakura-san says, heading around the bar to grab his hat. “This guy can take care of you for now. You know the steps, Kurusu.”

Welp.

His phone beeps in his pocket. He draws it out, but before he can check it Sakura-san adds “Leave that thing on the counter when you’re serving guests!” right before he walks out the door.

“Cranky old goat,” Akira mumbles. “What can I get you...Akechi-san?”

Akechi Goro, TV’s famous Second Coming of the Detective Prince, cocks his head a little. “What would you recommend, ah, Kurusu-san, was it?” He pulls out a phone, a sleek black model, tilting it slightly in Akira’s direction.

Akira shrugs. “It’s my first day on the job.”

“Then I’ll put my trust in your capable hands.” Akechi smiles pleasantly, and taps his phone against Akira’s. Seconds later, it buzzes, a single notification lighting up the screen.

 

 _Contact request: Akechi Goro_  
_Status: Bonded, Active_ _  
_ Confirm? Y/N

 

His eyes drift upward slowly, uncontrollably. Akechi’s grin hasn’t faltered.

“I think,” he says, “that we may have some things in common to talk about, Kurusu-san. Don’t you?”

     

 

**Author's Note:**

> a couple more thank yous:  
> -everyone in the shark tank who's had to listen to me bitch for the last five months  
> -ara and chiri for looking over my hot mess of a fic and nitpicking real good  
> -vodka for the last minute suggestions saving my literal bacon  
> -jube drew art that isn't immediately relevant but you can bet the hot second it is that i'll be plastering it all over your eyeballs  
> -retro and mig again for the amazing art i'm still like glancing over at it every now and then adn going q~q because i'm tendy  
> -and you!! thank you so much for reading!


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